


Call the Shot

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [3]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Backstory, Gen, Toast had a family, daemon AU, out in the wastes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-29
Updated: 2015-11-29
Packaged: 2018-05-04 01:04:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5314193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Toast grew up with sand between her teeth and a honed knowing of how thin the line is between dehydration and survival. </p><p>Exploring the backstories of the Five Wives, now with more daemons!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Call the Shot

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired in no small part by ssstrychnine's posts: http://oneangryshot.tumblr.com/post/126466310172
> 
> There be plenty of my own thoughts in here, don't worry.

She grew up on the sands, bare feet callused before she could walk, her daemon a cheetah, a hawk, a dog by her side. The end of the world had come and gone, she knew that from the adults that shepherded her around as easily as they corralled the travelers and survivors they came across. But the distant apocalypse was abstract knowledge, superseded by the daily challenges of finding water, food, fuel, ammo. You always need more of everything at the end of the world. 

Children were not especially rare among her family; it seemed like at least one woman was always growing round and uncomfortable, demanding special treatment, extra food and water ‘for the baby.’ She got it, too, until she miscarried, or the infant was born dead. Toast counted those among the lucky ones. Their hard-scrabble life couldn’t afford burdens to the group, a fact that Toast was taught over and over. 

When she was six, a car spiked all over like the porcupine her Tarl looked like sometimes rampaged through their camp and left a man without his legs. The family helped him heal from the physical wounds, but the man had lost something inside, and would do nothing but sit passenger, still as a corpse. Toast herself was more help to the group. 

They left him and his fennec fox daemon by the side of a deserted building, the roof nothing but collapsed ribs on top of a concrete block. Toast thought, rather poetically, that the building and the man resembled each other. Both had once housed human beings, but the Wasteland had left them caved in empty, like a collapsed jerrycan. Tarl was more uncertain, and kept shifting between a fennec fox and a bearded dragon all night, cuddling close to her for warmth. “I don’t like it,” he’d said, but when she asked he would just shake his head and shift again. “I don’t like leaving him.”

There was a woman, an old Army lady with a rottweiler daemon who taught Toast how to load and shoot and oil and polish all the guns she had. Her name had been Jamee, but everyone in the tribe called her Jam. “Jam, like a gun jams?” Toast had asked, pulling back the bolt of a rifle to expose the inner core. 

Jam had gone quiet, and then she’d ruffled Toast’s hair and sighed. “Sure, kid,” she’d said, pulling a bullet for the gun from her pocket. “That’s what it means.”

When she was ten she called out the shots from the back of Jam’s bike, and at first the riders always double-checked her, counting the bullets in their own guns. She learned to recognize the sound of the three different rifles, two shot guns, and five pistols that her family carried. She learned to balance their numbers in her head like a drop of water balanced on her palm, trembling with the beat of her heart. 

Tarl rode in a sling on her back, or he flew by her side, or he raced the bike across rock and dust. But he didn’t much fancy flying, and he’d rather stay close by where he could protect Toast if something crashed. And it did. 

Not every day, but there was no such thing as good luck in the Wasteland. When the skeleton boys came over her horizon, Toast was nineteen and Tarl had settled into the shape of a badger, heavy and warm on her back. She had a bike of her own, because Jack had died from drinking too much sour water, and she carried one of Jam’s pistols strapped to her leg, where she could get at it easy. 

The first car came over the dune, full of screaming War Boys, and then the second. And then the third. When the fourth appeared Jam turned her bike aside, a flurry of dust clouding her heels, and set her course for the empty horizon. There was no fighting numbers like that, no salvage to be won. This time, they _were_ the salvage, being hunted like Jam’s rottweiler hunted the mutated mice that hopped out after dark. 

Toast swerved so steeply that the edge of her foot caught the sand, and she hissed as the skin was burned away. She recovered, but she’d lost ground, and even crouched low over her handlebars, she knew in a second that she wasn’t going to outpace the patrol coming up behind her. 

Though she expected it, it hurt like crazy to see her family racing away over the sand, none of them so much as glancing back. It hurt and it hurt and she thought it was the worst hurt she could ever feel. Worse than the spill she took, trying to swerve away from the first of the pursuit vehicles, the lancer out back leaning out of his perch to grab at her arm, at her sling. 

She went tumbling, and took Tarl with her, and the moment she was standing she ran for it. Even knowing she could never make it. Even then, Tarl kept pace with her, his heavy coat full of dust and sand but no burden to a daemon. She dropped the first biker who pulled up next to her with a bullet to the brain, no more than two feet from her. His bike spun out in front of her, but she couldn’t afford to pick it up. She wouldn’t be able to gather Tarl up before she ran, and it wasn’t like she could leave him behind.

They caught her, of course. She emptied her pistol first, and five more War Boys went down before one got close enough to bring her down. It wasn’t even her they caught, in the end. It was Tarl, who snarled and screamed and Toast felt someplace inside of her ripped open, a bleeding wound made with white hands. They caught her and tied her hand and foot and threw her in the back of a cab like a sack of grain. They threw her in a different cab than they put Tarl. 

She felt the moment they stopped touching him, and could have sobbed with relief. This, she thought, must be the worst pain anyone can endure without breaking. Because she didn’t break, she thought, it must mean nothing worse could possibly occur. And the pain of separation, when the patrol cars drew too far apart, that hurt, but she could bear it. Toast curled into herself and ignored the stabbing pins and needles in her arms and legs, and she bore it as silently as she knew how. They were still alive. That was what mattered.

And even after the Citadel loomed up over her, a cancerous growth of rock and metal, Toast only spat on the blackened forehead of the Imperator who inspected her. He laughed and sent her down to the Organic Mechanic’s caves, and Toast, even with her feet hobbled and her hands long since gone numb behind her back, kicked her feet into the slimy man’s sternum and wrench her way out of the War Boys’ hands and she just managed to brush her fingertips against Tarl’s muzzle when they caught her again. 

 


End file.
